Other Platforms

Performance Tips

There are numerous avenues to extract maximum performance out of FFmpeg when it is built from source. The following list describes some of them:

If using GCC/Clang, consider adding -march=native to --extra-cflags to make slightly better use of your hardware. Alternatively, for a more general solution, examine the --arch and --cpu options. Gains are variable, and usually quite small. However, this is usually even more safe than the above, and is thus listed here.

Depending on your use case, --enable-hardcoded-tables may be a useful option. It results in an increase of approximately 15% in the size of libavcodec, the main library impacted by this change. It enables savings in table generation time, done once at codec initialization, since by hardcoding the tables, they do not need to be computed at runtime. However, the savings are often negligible (~100k cycles is a typical number) especially when amortized over the entire encoding/decoding operation. By default, this is not enabled. Improvements are being made to the runtime initialization, and so over time, this option will have an impact on fewer and fewer codecs.